Airway Beacon 18 - Pueblo to Cheyenne

In 1924, the federal government funded enormous concrete arrows to be built every 10 miles or so along established airmail routes to help the pilots trace their way across America at night.

Each was built connected to a 50 foot tall tower with a rotating light and a rest house for the folks that maintained the generators and lights. This series of caches is placed to commemorate these lost pieces of American history.

The United States Postal Service first made the arrows in 1924. What? The Postal Service? Why did they make the arrows? In the early 1920s, airplanes hadn’t been around for very long. The Postal Service was experimenting with using airplanes to deliver mail. The Postal Service established routes along which to fly airmail. They called the routes “airways.” The Postal Service decided that pilots needed to be able to fly during both day and night to deliver the mail quickly. So they came up with the idea of building arrows and beacons. They built the towers in the middle of the concrete arrows. These giant arrows were the foundations for electrical beacons. The postal service hired people to turn on the beacons every night to guide airmail pilots flying airways in the dark. These people were a lot like lighthouse keepers.

How far apart were the arrows? They placed the beacons about every ten miles along an airway. The beacons or lights sat on top of tall steel towers, between 20 and 87 feet high. The beacons were two, very bright lights (1,250,000 candlepower). They ran on electricity and rotated so that a pilot would see flashes. They were only 10 miles apart so that when a pilot arrived at one beacon, he could see the flashes of the next. Did the arrows all point the same direction? No. The arrows pointed towards the next beacon along the airway, so pilots could use them to stay on course during daylight hours. The towers and foundations were painted with bright colors (yellow and black or orange and white) so pilots could see them easily.

The department worried that beacons were not good enough to guide pilots during bad weather. Soon it experimented with radio and radar, since these might be more efficient methods of guiding pilots. As these methods improved, the department decommissioned the lighted beacons. The department removed most of them by the mid-1940s. They took down the steel towers to be used for other things in other places. They left the foundations to confuse future archaeologists that were born years after they were removed.

Each beacon was given a name based on the Airmail Route it was pointing for, which beacon it was in the chain, and a Permanent Identifier (PID) name for tracking by the NGS.

This cache is placed near Beacon 18 of the Pueblo to Cheyenne airway, PID LL1272. The beacon at this location has been destroyed. Due to the coordinates being on private property, it is difficult to discern if there are any remnants at the site.

Congratulations to team tiger pride on being the First to Find!!!!

Additional Waypoints

R14V3N8 - Beacon 18 location
N 40° 49.584 W 104° 48.627
Actual location of Beacon 18, now destroyed